Macclesfield Lit & Phil 2020/21

Membership of the Macclesfield Literary and Philosophical Society for the 2020-2021 season costs £20 per person which covers entry to all meetings.

For those not wishing to become members a guest fee of £5 is payable on the door for each meeting. 18 year-olds and under are admitted free.

2020/2021 Programme

Thursday 24th September 2020 (Zoom)
Becoming Human: a Post-humanist Archaeology
Rachel Crellin is a lecturer in archaeology at Leicester University. Her research interests lie in archaeological theory and the development of a feminist post-humanist archaeology, the Neolithic and Bronze Ages of Britain and Ireland and metalwork wear-analysis.

Tuesday 13th October 2020 (Zoom)
The Idea of the Brain
Matthew Cobb is a Professor of Zoology at Manchester University. He studies the sense of smell and the history of science. In this talk he explores the past present and future of our understanding of the brain.
The AGM will follow the talk and discussion.

Thursday 19th November 2020 (Zoom)
Aurora-the Greatest Light Show on Earth (and other planets)
Colin Forsyth is a NERC Independent Research Fellow at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory. He studies geomagnetic substorms-large scale disruptions of the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Tuesday 19th January 2021
Little Nephews: George Orwell’s Big Brother and his Literary Offspring
Adam Stock is a lecturer in English at York St John University. His expertise is in utopian studies, modernism and contemporary literature.

Thursday 25th February 2021
Music, Magic and Dance in Latin America
Grevel Lindop is a freelance poet, biographer and travel writer. His book Travels on the Dance Floor was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He represented the UK at the Granada, Nicaragua Poetry Festival in 2012.

Tuesday 23rd March 2021
Joseph McCabe
Dr Bill Cooke teaches philosophy and religious studies at Priestley College in Warrington and is president of the Warrington Lit & Phil. Joseph McCabe was born in Macclesfield in 1867. He was the author of more than 50 books and hundreds of pamphlets. One of the 20th-century’s pioneering popularisers of science, he paved the way for people like Isaac Asimov, Julian Huxley and Richard Dawkins.

Thursday 22nd April 2021
Counting People: Stories in the History of Census Taking in England and Wales
Kevin Schürer is Professor of English Local History and a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University. His interests are in aspects of historical demography and the history of the family, together with social and economic history, primarily in the 19th and early 20th-centuries.

Tuesday 18th May 2021
Ancient Dumps, Modern Treasures: the Modern Market in Papyrus Manuscripts
Roberta Mazza is an Italian ancient historian and papyrologist. She is honorary academic curator at the Manchester Museum and Research Fellow of the John Rylands Research Institute.

Covid-19. The first three talks of the season will be on-line only via Zoom at the usual starting time (7.30 pm). We will review the situation for the new year after these. Members will be informed of the means of accessing Zoom talks beforehand.